Sidestream – an AI chat app with a side of insight
Hi. My name is Eric Brandon and I’ve built an AI chat app that feels really different. While you talk with an AI model in a chat pane, a second AI model is reading over the conversation and seeking out useful, interesting, surprising, amusing, and fact-checking information that wouldn’t have appeared in the main chat. You can read those “discoveries” on their own, or click them into your main chat to steer the conversation in a new direction. This is based on the observation that talking to smart people is usually more enjoyable, interesting, and informative than talking to a smart AI.…
Sidestream – an AI chat app with a side of insight launched on January 6, 2026 with 6 votes, #2,272 of 14,584 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
A free, cross-platform, cross-model, AI chat app with a side dish of insights - ericbrandon/sidestream
A free, open-source, cross-platform, cross-model AI chat app that adds useful, interesting, amusing, and critical information you wouldn't have known about otherwise. Human conversation is better than AI conversation because people aren't "helpful assistants". Sidestream does ALL of that and makes your conversations with AI way more useful and interesting than you've experienced before. NOT the obvious first-page Google results, Wikipedia summaries, or mainstreamfrom github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi. My name is Eric Brandon and I’ve built an AI chat app that feels really different. While you talk with an AI model in a chat pane, a second AI model is reading over the conversation and seeking out useful, interesting, surprising, amusing, and fact-checking information that wouldn’t have appeared in the main…
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